4K and 8K: This is the future of television

The IFA electronics show in Berlin was marked by 4k TVs as the model of Sony XBR-84X900 with its 84-inch screen, you must scale the images to the low supply of content for TV like this and its resolution of 3,840 x 2160 pixels.

One way to cover what it means to 4K resolution is to consider that the 525 lines of the old analog sets correspond to 480i resolution, while the newer TV in our market have 720p or 1080p.

However, the most surprising thing on TV at the fair IFA is that for the second consecutive year is showing Panasonic TV 8K Super-Hi Vision 145 22.2 inch with surround sound, which is a prototype that was made in conjunction with the Japanese television channel NHK for household and whose resolution reaches 70 mm IMAX format.

(C) Engadget

The Olympic trials

While conducting the London 2012 Olympic Games, the Japanese channel NHK conducted a series of public presentations format 8K Super-Hi Vision in London, Washington DC and Tokyo. The tickets were free and it was a real consolation prize for many who failed to enter the Olympic venues.

The Japanese public broadcaster shocked the audience with a 145 inch screen (ie its diagonal was 3.7 meters long), whose resolution was 7680 x 4320 pixels and video reproducing the 60 frames per second, where each frame equivalent to a 32-megapixel image from a camera.

The material shown correspond to images taken directly from Olympic competition at the Aquatic Center, the Olympic Stadium, the Velodrome and Basketball Arena, along with a short video of the opening ceremony. It is considered that the images were taken with only three existing cameras capable of recording in 8K Super Hi-Vision, they are prototypes that NHK is still working to reduce its size to achieve to be travel size.

After the presentation online comments were quite favorable with the new technology. Attendees even said that at times confused the image with reality, as the size and high resolution allows observing all the little details with the same quality, as well as 24-channel surround sound could confuse viewers between applause and the video.

Presentations were classified as a success, so much so that Tim Plyming, the coordinator in London between NHK and the BBC, claimed with great optimism that “the 8K is the most you can understand the human eye. It’s the end of the story concerning the resolutions “.

(C) Engadget

The new UN standard

A week ago , the Standardization Sector (ITU-T), Department of International Telecommunication Union (ITU) under the UN approved the 8K Super Hi-Vision as an industry standard for television.

The ITU-T carries Norman communications worldwide since 1865, giving the nod to protocol standards such as fax machines, the Internet Protocol (IP), JPEG images, ADSL and video coding standard H.264, among many others.

So, as you can ensure that the format of ultra-high definition created by NHK will be the future of television, however, mass adoption is still decades away.

Landing in the harsh reality

For now, TVs ‘only’ as the model 4K 84LM9600 LG 84-inch are available only in South Korea and cost about 25 billion won, or about U.S. $22,050. Furthermore, discounting a few sample videos on YouTube 4K recorded, there is no content available for viewing. The only option would be certain Blu-ray players ( like the PlayStation 3 ) that are able to scale the disk image to this resolution.

While the format 8K Super-Hi Vision is further distant, for it was only in mid-May NHK held its first experimental evidence of transmission , sending the signal to four miles away and reaching a speed of 23 megabytes per second without making mistakes . An impressive milestone considering that on a DVD are only two and a half minutes of video compressed in this format.

In fact, the Japanese public broadcaster plans to start making the first official test drive 2020, while analysts estimate that specialized price and TVs capable of playing this format just fall in 2025 of the $10,000.